Robert Rodriguez puts aside his spy kiddies and gets back to his adult film series with the third film featuring his guitar playing, gun-toting El Mariachi, Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Antonio Banderas stars, along with Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe and Selma Hayek and WhereIsHeNow Mickey Rourke in a nice cameo. Most of you will probably be more familiar with 1995’s Desparado, the second film, than with the low-budget indie original El Mariachi.
Writer/director Rodriguez–who also produced, edited and scored OUATIM–got a big budget to make this one and the money’s not hard to see on the screen, plenty of big explosions and wire work fight choreography for sure. The problem is that it’s all show and little substance. I kept thinking ‘This is a very slow moving cartoon’ as it played. There’s too much voiceover, too many flashbacks (including every single seen in which Hayek appears), and too little coherence.
Not recommended
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